Shadows and Light
by Gamemakers
Summary: Katniss Everdeen wants nothing more than to wait out the latest galactic conflict, to someday leave her days of smuggling behind to go home to Panem. But when the Confederacy puts a bounty out on her sister and childhood friend, she finds herself at the center of events she never could have imagined. Star Wars AU.
1. Chapter 1

**Prologue**

* * *

She laid the cards before her with a grace that only years of practice could provide. The leftmost came first. The Evil One. Flipping the center revealed the Destroyed Starship. The air suddenly went cold around her. The woman blew out the candle beside her, for the galaxy held some things the light should never touch. Lit only by the sliver of moonlight that crept into her room, she reached for the last card, her hand trembling.

"The Evil One, the Destroyed Starship, and the Queen of Air and Darkness," she whispered into the night. "The Evil One, the Destroyed Starship, and the Queen of Air and Darkness." The woman repeated it again and again, backing away from the cards, her fingers tangling in her dark hair. When her back hit the wall, she sank to the ground. "The Evil One, the Destroyed Starship, and the Queen of Air and Darkness." As her knees came up to her chest and her whispers morphed into hysterics, the moon slipped behind the clouds, leaving her with only the darkness for comfort.


	2. Chapter 2

**Act One: The Evil One**

* * *

 _Kuat City, Kuat_

Rough hands pulled her back, and she felt the cool metal of a blaster barrel against her forehead. "One wrong move, Everdeen, and I'll blast your brains out." The alley had been a bad idea. If she had to get shot, she could at least get shot in a place that didn't reek of fish and where every shadow did not house a different species of vermin.

"I don't have the money, Clove."

"Just the answer I was hoping for." The grip tightened, fingernails digging into the skin of her upper arm, but the woman still did not shoot. Clove always had liked to play with her food.

Katniss' hand crept down towards where her own weapon was stored in a thigh holster. "I'll have it soon, though. We've got this run set up, nice and easy, quick money. We can pay your boss as soon as we -"

"Touch that blaster, and you die."

She raised her right hand. This would be easier if she could see the bounty hunter, but Clove remained behind her, one arm keeping Katniss immobilized while the other kept a blaster at her temple.

"You're out of tricks. That's what you said last time," the bounty hunter continued. "You get the money to me now, today, or you're not gonna live long enough to make that run." Her finger tightened on the trigger, and for a moment, Katniss was certain she was about to die. She steeled herself as best she could, but the shot never came. "You're dealing with dangerous people, Everdeen, and you're way out of your league. You can't really think Cray's going to let you rip him off like that, can you?"

Clove stood a few inches taller than Katniss, and she had a bit more muscle to her as well. Katniss would have a hard time fighting her off. But perhaps, if she played her cards right, it wouldn't come to that. "The job's worth more than I owe. Tell Cray I'll pay him an extra ten percent."

"And how do I know you're not going to run off with the money? I don't even know that this is a real job."

"Would I lie to you about something like this?" The woman spun her around so that they faced each other. Much to Katniss' disappointment, through the entire process, Clove never let go of her arm. She responded with a lopsided grin."Tell you what. We can make an easy ten percent extra for Cray. I know he wants to crack down on people, but he's a businessman first. He won't wanna lose out on a chance like this one. See, Gale and I'll take a loss on this one. Eat the costs ourselves, pass the extra on to you personally. Three thousand, way more than Cray'll pay for me."

The woman wasn't wearing her full armor today. Katniss could understand that. This part of Kuat was far more genteel than the areas she had become accustomed to these last few years. In neighborhoods like this one, where the city planted flowers along the paths and the only places you could get a drink were trendy wine bars with nothing for less than twelve, maybe fifteen credits, body armor did tend to make one stick out. So did carrying two BlasTechs and wearing a chest plate, but Katniss wasn't about to point that out to her. "You'd better be honest about –"

She heard the shot being fired and the scream at the same time, and for a precious few milliseconds, she wasn't sure which had come first. But Katniss' instincts had been honed through years of living on the edge of the law, and her body moved without her mind's conscious involvement. She swung for Clove's unprotected abdomen, her elbow connecting with the soft flesh there. Before she fully realized what she was doing, Katniss began to scan the area, blaster in hand, searching for other potential attackers. Spotting nothing, she turned back to see Clove lying on the ground, her face already ashen and still.

"Katniss!"

Ignoring the man's voice, she kicked away Clove's two blasters before kneeling down next to the other woman. She watched her face for any trace of motion and, seeing none, grabbed her wrist to check for a pulse. "Gale, you didn't have to do that. I had it under control."

"She had you immobilized and staring down the end of her blaster. I don't think that counts as being in control." He had just killed a woman. He shouldn't sound so collected and in control.

"I was going to buy her off!"

"And now you don't have to. Come on, let's get out of here. If Clove's here, Cato can't be far behind."

He tugged on her sleeve, and Katniss pushed him away. "Don't touch me."

Gale shrugged. "Fine, Catnip. But I'm not going to apologize for killing Clove when she had her blaster to your forehead."

"Then you can apologize for the fact that neither of us will be able to show our faces anywhere in the system again. This isn't some seedy tapcaf. The people that live here keep flowerbeds in a city where land goes for ten thousand credits per square meter. You really think they don't have holocams watching us right now? Think the authorities haven't been alerted already?"

"Then that's all the more reason to get out of here. Come on."

She couldn't argue with that, so she followed him, almost having to run to keep up with his brisk pace. Already, she could see well-dressed Kuati watching them, a few of their mouths hanging wide open while children or pets begged for their attention. More worryingly, she spotted a handful with tall, muscular non-humans behind them. Given how paranoid the Kuati could be, she would bet anything they were bodyguards. Though, she supposed, considering that their most recent run had been for a Kuati judge high enough up on the food chain that she could afford to have close to three million credits worth of high-quality glitterstim delivered directly to her, maybe they were right to be concerned. What mattered right now was that one or two pointed hand-held holocams in their direction.

Katniss nodded to Gale, and they turned down a side street. Her knees pounded and every strike of foot against duracrete made the split in her side scream, but they couldn't stop yet. "Find a speeder to hotwire, and let's get out of here," she gasped.

She had hardly finished her sentence when Gale grabbed her arm. "This one. C'mon." He hopped into the driver's seat of the roofless model, and a few deft movements later, he had the engine roaring to life beneath them.

* * *

 _District 12, Panem_

The lines of the ledger sheet ran together as he studied the document. Peeta tapped his pen against the counter in time with the whirring of the fan above. Though he kept every window open, the summer always brought weeks of heat and humidity to the district, and the oven only made the heat even more unbearable.

An excuse to look away from the ledger came when the bell above the door rang. "Good afternoon."

"Afternoon, Peeta." Darius tossed him a lazy half-salute as he stepped inside, allowing the screen door to slam shut behind him. "How you doing today?"

"Hot, but I'm doing all right. How 'bout you? What can I help you with today?"

The Peacekeeper peeled a piece of flimsi off the top of the pile he carried and handed it to Peeta. "You got a place to hang this up? I've got to get them up in all the businesses in this part of town."

 _EXTENDED CURFEW HOURS_

 _2000 TO 0600 HOURS_

 _INCREASED PENALTIES STRICTLY ENFORCED_

Peeta did his best to keep his voice steady. "Sure, will over there work?" He nodded towards the far wall.

"Yeah, I think it should. Mind if I use the glue, or do you have something else you'd like me to use?"

"The glue's fine." Peeta watched as Darius got to work. "Can I get you something to drink? I've got some lemonade, if you'd like any."

"Yes, please. It's like a furnace out there. I don't know how you stand it in here all day."

"You get used to it after a while." He fetched the pitcher of lemonade from the cooler, savoring the blast of cold air it released when opened. When he returned to the front, Darius sat at the counter, waiting for him. Once two tall glasses had been poured, the real conversation could begin. "Two hours on both sides is sure going to be a pinch on us. Think you'll be making some exceptions? I need to be at the bakery by five hundred hours at the latest to get the ovens up and running."

"Can't you old man do it? He's still living upstairs, isn't he?"

"He is, but my mother hasn't been well, and he can't leave her alone for an hour. Rye and I have been pretty well running the place for the last few months." He took a long drink of lemonade. Outside, he could hear children playing. Peeta couldn't help but wonder how soon that sound might become foreign.

"Sorry to hear that, mate. I wish I could help, but I'm not allowed to grant exceptions. You could try and bring it up with Commander Thread."

"Do you think it'd help?" The look on Darius' face told him the answer. Instead, he tried a different approach. "It says there are increased punishments. Are they raising the fines?"

Darius winced. "Don't be out past curfew, and you won't find out." He drained the rest of his glass. "Thanks for the lemonade, Peeta, but I've got to get going. The commander wants all of these in place before the formal announcement tonight. Take care of yourself, all right?"

"You too, Darius." He showed the man out, waving to the children that played tag in the square. Though it was only early afternoon, he flipped the sign from open to closed and locked the door. He read the sign over once more before he returned to the back to start the day's clean up.


	3. Chapter 3

_Im'g'twe Hills, Geonosis_

The rocky hills not far outside Geonosis' capital city held many secrets. Orange spires dozens of stories tall stabbed into the sky, while at their bases, meter-long, six-legged lizards scurried into the shadows as she passed. With their collective love of blood sports, the Geonosians had hunted the most dangerous beasts of these hills to extinction hundreds of years ago. But as Johanna had learned over the last three days of trekking, even without its native monsters, Geonosis could still be deadly. Winds that reached ninety, perhaps a hundred kilometers per hour whipped at her face, sending sand and dirt hurtling towards her eyes and mouth. She sported hundreds of tiny cuts where the jagged pieces had ripped at both her clothing and the skin underneath.

Though her throat was parched, Johanna hesitated to drink the few precious drops of water that remained in her canteen. She had found a spring the first day, but since then, there had been no water to be seen. There had to be water somewhere, because otherwise the lizards would not be able to live here, but it was well-hidden.

At the low, dull roar of an engine, Johanna pressed herself into one of the crevices in the rock formation. The ship flew low over the hills, far lower than there should be any reason to. According to her maps, there wasn't another settlement for eighty kilometers in that direction.

But maps, particularly official ones, often neglected to mention the most interesting features. Seven years in Intelligence had taught her that. She grabbed her macrobinoculars from her equipment belt and trained them on the ship. Johanna watched in amazement as a hole easily a hundred meters wide opened up in the ground, easily swallowing the freighter before disappearing again.

She typed a short request for backup into her datapad. Johanna had little doubt of her ability to get into the facility, but nobody hid hangars underground and kilometers away from civilization if they wanted them to be found. Getting out - and living to tell the tale - might be more of a challenge. She had better get on with it, then. Johanna pressed her cheek against the cool stone for just a moment, savoring the partial relief it gave from the sun, tightened the straps on her supply pack, and stepped out of her hiding spot. The hangar couldn't have been more than six or seven kilometers away. She could be there by nightfall and off this Force-forsaken world by morning.

* * *

By the time she reached the clearing, Johanna's legs quaked beneath her with every step. Though she was burning up, she hadn't sweat in hours. Johanna knew the symptoms of dehydration, had sat through hours of lectures on what to do in these situations, but she couldn't stop now. Air patrols swept the area at least every half hour, and she had dodged more than one ground force in the last two kilometers. She took that as a sign that she was honing in on her target. Excellent.

She stopped when she reached the clearing. This was going to be the tricky part. Though she couldn't spot any obvious holocams or guard stations, there had to be eyes watching, guarding this place. Nobody would build a hangar out here if they weren't going to protect it from prying eyes. Her vision swam, and unconsciousness beckoned to her, inviting, but Johanna forced herself to focus on the area before her. One couldn't make a perfectly invisible hangar. There must be a seam, a crack, a control panel, something that a well-trained eye could pick up on. And perhaps, had dusk not been fading into night around her, there might have been, but she could see nothing.

Johanna had largely given up on finding the entrance before her backup arrived when she noticed movement on the far side of the clearing. Making sure she was well within the shadow of the spire above, she watched through her macrobinoculars as eight Geonosians emerged from an entryway that had appeared the ground. The eight filed out two by two, maintaining their formation as they headed out in the opposite direction from where she sat. That'd be the next set of guards, then. Good to know.

She waited until they disappeared, then edged her way along the perimeter of the clearing. It took her several minutes to make her way to the entrance. Now that she knew the door's location, it seemed impossible that she had not noticed it earlier. From this angle, the seam in the ground was clearly visible, and it took her only a moment to locate the button that opened the door. A blast of cool air hit her as she descended down the pedramp, and after spending three days out in the heat, she was tempted to stay and enjoy it. Maybe she could find some water down here and…

No, the mission came first. It was a miracle the Geonosians hadn't discovered her presence already; she couldn't tempt fate by wasting any time.

She wandered through long, meandering hallways of the same red stone as the rock formations above. Created for the insectoid Geonosians, even a small human like Johanna had to stoop in the tight space. She kept hold of her blaster at all times, ready for any signs of movement. In the distance, she heard clanging, grinding, the sounds of industry, heavy manufacturing. After rounding one more corner, the cramped space opened up into a huge cavern. Johanna found herself on a catwalk above an enormous assembly line. Workers poured liquid metal into molds in time with a mechanical stamp. The chamber stretched on for as far as she could see in every direction, and the entire area was consumed in a hive of activity. Johanna traced through the steps of production, from wiring to stamping to molding, back for another round of wiring, and so on. With the exception of scale, it was nothing she had not seen before. But when she craned her neck back, she could see rows upon rows of the final product, and it made her blood run cold.

Battle droids, hundreds of them. And that had to be just today's creations, for as she watched, fifty, a hundred more came off the assembly lines. How many could this facility produce in a week, a month? No world needed those kinds of forces for self-defense alone.

Johanna grabbed the holocam from her belt. With fumbling hands, she turned it on and trained it on the lines below. "This is Agent Johanna Mason, reporting from the Im'g'twe Hills region of Geonosis, coordinates one-seven-niner-niner-three-eight. I have found an unregistered underground factory that produces battle droids." Right now, even the act of talking made her stomach churn, and she worried she would collapse where she stood. Not certain what else to say, Johanna guided the lens towards the finished droids. Her hand froze of its own accord.

Her eyes widened, and she tried to retreat back into the shadows, but her body remained frozen. A horrible buzzing filled her mind, insectoid chittering that drowned out any rational thought besides the searing pain in her hand. Johanna's knees crumpled beneath her, and the last thing she remembered was the pool of liquid metal that had once been her holocam burning through the flesh of her palm.

* * *

 _District 12, Panem_

After that day, the new decrees came quickly. Longer hours in the mines. Increased quotas. Lower pay. Limited permissible travel between the main town and the outlying villages. Frictions rose along with the temperatures. Old disputes between neighbors, unpaid debts that hadn't been mentioned in years, any excuse for a fight got tempers flared up in the once-peaceful district. Peeta tried not to think of the daily scuffles as foreshocks, but everyone realized the big one had to be coming soon.

The situation had been bad for business. Before the pay cuts, a few of the better-to-do miners had bought their bread from the bakery, and a handful even made a weekly habit of picking up a treat or two. But when you never knew if today was the last day you'd be able to afford to feed your family, bakery bread seemed too large a luxury for anyone. Still, Rye showed up as early as he could in the mornings to fire up the ovens, and Peeta stayed late every evening to get every customer they could. Today he'd baked only five loaves, less than a tenth what he would before the decrees, and at closing time, three of them still sat before him.

He ripped a chunk off and stuffed it into his mouth. At least it tasted good. Peeta wrapped one of the others up in a clean cloth for Rye in the morning. The third, he took with him for his parents as he headed upstairs. The new decrees had made it impossible for him to fulfill his obligations at the bakery while continuing to live on his own. It saved him some rent money. Maybe he'd have a little cushion built up by the time things calmed down.

While he wiped down the counters, he heard noises outside. A quick look at the chrono told him it was well past curfew. A flash of orange light joined the shouting.

The Seam. The neighborhood of ramshackle huts where the miners lived. It had to be. And if that place lit on fire, with all that fine layer of coal dust they never managed to quite clean away…

Peeta was out the door in an instant, consequences be damned. As he raced towards the Seam, he saw other townspeople emerging from their houses and shops. A few ran towards the scene as well, but many stood, taking in the curiosity of the faraway flames and screams. He wanted to drag them along, but Peeta couldn't stop now. He remembered all too well the last fire they'd had in the Seam. Clothes left too close to an open fireplace, the official ruling had been. Completely accidental. But that hadn't stopped it from killing eleven people, three entire families. And compared to the flames that danced in the sky tonight, that thing had been tiny.

The bang of a gunshot echoed in his ears, and for the first time, it occurred to Peeta that the fires might not be accidental. But he refused to stop now, when so many people were in danger, and –

The scene that greeted him was one straight from hell. Flames burst from the windows and ate at the roofs of the few houses left standing. In the smoke, he could make out only outlines of the flailing bodies. Only a few meters away, a woman lay, bleeding from a wound in her face. Peeta started towards her, but a young girl got there first. Satisfied that she would be well taken care of, he began to look for the other wounded.

"Step away from her." At the cold voice, Peeta stopped, only to realize the words had not been intended for him. "I said step away."

Peeta turned to see a Peacekeeper level his blaster at the girl and the old woman, and without thinking, he hurtled himself towards the man. He hadn't wrestled in years, but once you learned the basics, you never forgot them. With the man pinned under him, Peeta managed to grab the gun away. One shot, and it was over.

"Peeta?" the girl asked, questioning.

He didn't tear his eyes away from the face of the Peacekeeper. Romulus Thread. It had to be. The world dropped out from underneath him, and he was falling. This was it. They wouldn't let him live after this. Dad, Rye, Mom, they were all practically dead already. He shouldn't have come. He should stay here and let himself and the body burn so nobody would ever have to know what happened. He should –

Small hands grabbed him, pulling him up. "Peeta, come on! We need to get out of here!" The girl, Prim, he remembered dully, Katniss' sister, dragged him along, and eventually, he ran to keep up with her. "We need to get out of Twelve. Your family has a speeder, right?"

"Yeah."

"We're gonna need it." Together, they raced towards the bakery. He could still hear the screams. He could go back now, save them, die with them. But Prim kept him moving back into town, part of an exodus from the Seam as everyone who could still stand evacuated.

It took only a few minutes to reach the shed where the Mellarks kept their beat-up old speeder. "You get in and get it started. I've got to grab something."

"Hurry."

He raced up the stairs two at a time. "Dad! Get Mom ready to go. We need to get out of here." Peeta ran into his bedroom, grabbing the sack of credits he'd been saving these last few weeks. "Dad, come on!"

"Go on, Peeta. We'll only slow you down."

"Dad, no, you don't understand. You'll die if you stay here."

"And if we go with you, we all will." His father had never looked older than in that moment. Blue eyes so much like his own met his. "Go." Daniel Mellark flinched as one of the downstairs windows shattered. "Go!" He pushed Peeta towards the stairs, and with one last look at his father, he hurried downstairs to where Prim and escape waited for him.


	4. Chapter 4

_Abernathy's Cantina, Coruscant_

Haymitch leaned back in his seat, the booth creaking with his weight. Over the last twenty years, his cantina had become a hotspot for smugglers, thieves, bounty hunters, and the other lowlifes that lurked about in the midlevels. If you were down on your luck and looking for work, you came to Abernathy's. Simple as that. "Seems to me like you've got an easy way out of this mess you got yourself into."

Katniss watched him over the rim of her glass. "I'm listening."

"Sell her off. The money'll be enough to pay off Cray and have someone smuggle your sister and mom out of Twelve. Or you could try your luck and see if you can get 'em out yourself."

"And then what do I do?"

"Settle down and go straight." Haymitch took another swig from his glass, finishing off his whiskey. Katniss was surprised it had lasted him this long. Though, she supposed, she wasn't sure how deep into his cup he'd been when she showed up. It was hard to tell with Haymitch. "It ain't fun, sweetheart, but we all have to give it up eventually."

That was rich, coming from him. She crossed her arms over her chest. "I'm not selling the _Mockingjay._ Cray can take her from my cold, dead hands."

"You think he won't? For a smart girl, you can sure be pretty stupid." He motioned for the waitress droid to grab him another drink, and she slapped one down on the table in front of him. "Thank you, ma'am. Hey, Rosie, why don't you grab another one for my friend here. Maybe she'll be a little more reasonable once I get her liquored up."

Katniss waited until the droid was well out of earshot to respond. Haymitch wouldn't bug the droids in here to eavesdrop, and he was smart enough to regularly check them for listening devices, but some caution in these situations never hurt. "I came here to see if you knew about shipments that needed delivering, not so you could tell me how to live. Trust me, if I was looking for life advice, you're the last person I'd ask." She should be glad the man had a soft spot for young smugglers from Panem, and grateful that the man had kept an eye out for her these past few years, but that didn't mean she had to appreciate his tendency to meddle in her affairs.

"I'm still alive, aren't I? The way you're going, you'll be lucky to make twenty-five. I don't think a single one of the idiots here'd take bets on thirty."

He had a point there, but Katniss wasn't about to give in so easily. "And if you stop, you might even stay that way for a little longer."

Rosie, or RZ-68, returned with another glass of whiskey for Katniss. "There's a message for you in the back, Haymitch," she said. A thick Coruscanti accent that surely hadn't been in the droid's original programming flavored her words. When he didn't get up fast enough for her, she added, "It said it was urgent." No droid had that much personality programmed in, but given Haymitch's tendency to not memory wipe his droids, it wasn't hard to believe Rosie was as much a person as anyone else here.

Katniss couldn't help but smile as Haymitch staggered back into the small office space. Habit made her check her surroundings. Neon signs lit up the bar area and the seats right next to the single, grimy window, but Haymitch allowed the rest of the cantina to remain dark. It'd been a good business decision, for the types of deals cut in this establishment were ones neither party would want brought up in the courts. In the shadows, she could make out only shapes. A few humanoids played sabacc in the corner, and in two of the booths, beings leaned in towards each other, doing their best not to be overheard. A man at the bar eyed her, but when Katniss glared at him, he turned back to his drink. Good.

Haymitch not so much sat as collapsed into his seat, his face pale. "They burned the Seam."

Those words hit her with more force than a physical blow. "Is Prim all right? My mom? Who did it? Did everyone make it out?"

"Katniss, you need to calm down. I don't know what happened to your mother."

Kriff him. The hell was wrong with him that he could keep calm when someone had kriffing burned their home to the ground? Haymitch might still think of himself as a Seam man, but Coruscant had changed him. Nobody with any real allegiance to Twelve or its people would be able to sit here, nice and calm, and just take what had happened. No, they had to fight, had to stop this from happening again, had to make them pay for what they'd –

Then, it hit her. "Do you know what happened to Prim?"

"There's a warrant out for her arrest. I don't know anything else."

Her body went terribly still, but her mind raced a thousand different directions, none of them good. Katniss' heart pounded against her chest, and she wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like, because wasn't it shock that caused those? And it wouldn't really matter if she died, not right now, now that Thread had Prim, was going to kill her, and Katniss didn't have much use for life after that.

Haymitch's hand on her cheek pulled her away from her thoughts. "Katniss, think about it for a minute. They have a warrant out for her arrest. What does that mean?" He waited a moment for her to answer, but all she could think of was Prim. Haymitch leaned in closer, grey eyes intense. "They don't know where she is, Katniss. If they did, they'd already have her."

"And we need to find her before Thread does," she supplied.

"There's my girl on fire." Any other time, she would have kicked him under the table for using that old nickname, but right now, it felt appropriate.

* * *

 _Intelligence Headquarters, Coruscant_

"You think I made it all up." Johanna searched the three faces for any hint of sympathy, but she found none. One, she couldn't get much of a read at all on, and given that the other two appeared downright hostile, she doubted she was going to get very far with this group. Standing in the center of the small room, with the three strangers seated before her, blocking her path to the door, she was trapped. "You don't think any of what I saw was real."

"You have been put through an extensive array of screenings, Agent Mason," one of them, a gaunt female Ishi Tib Johanna knew only as Captain Ishgard, said. "We have no doubt that you believe that you saw a manufacturing plant on Geonosis. But all the other evidence presented to us suggests otherwise."

"I know what I saw."

This time, it was the Bothan to her left that spoke. "And perhaps you believe you do, but your report states that you collapsed inside the facility. Agent Blight found you outside in the desert only two hours after your last comm call, unconscious due to severe dehydration." She had never liked Captain Kan'fey, and given how this meeting had been going so far, Johanna doubted that was going to change anytime soon.

This meeting had toed the line between debriefing and interrogation from the very beginning, but now, Johanna felt that it had shifted too far towards interrogation. "How do you explain this, then?" She held out her hand, still bandaged after a week spent in a bacta tank. The medics said she might regain full use of it someday, but only with months of bacta treatments and physical therapy. The only part of that message that had really sunk in was the 'might'. She had seen too much of the galaxy to ever bet on the good outcome.

"There are many ways you could have injured your hand without entering a secret underground factory." The Bothan delivered his words with the same slow, patronizing tone that one might use with a small child.

Ignoring the pain that blazed up her arm, Johanna undid the bandage. "Then tell me, how did this happen?" Captain Ishgard winced at the sight before her. Underneath the bandage, the skin was puckered, scarred red and violet all the way across her palm and up onto her wrist. "Tell me, huh? How did I manage to get liquid metal poured all over my hand? Because even while I was dehydrated, I'm pretty kriffing sure I would have noticed that happening. And no hallucination would've been able to do that by itself."

At this, the human woman before her smiled. The only one of her interrogators that Johanna had not known before today, she had remained silent through the entire debriefing. Johanna was about to ask her what she wanted, if she thought that her wound and the circumstances surrounding it were funny, but something stopped her. "Do you mind if I see for myself?" the old woman asked, her voice both soft as a whisper and strong enough to carry to the corners of the room.

Johanna shook her head and held out her arm. Her eyes widened when she felt something brush against her mind. "Don't be afraid, Johanna. I'm not going to hurt you." Without conscious thought, the events on Geonosis replayed themselves in perfect clarity. Johanna relived the landing, the hike, finding the factory, the holocam melting in her hand. Kriff, it hurt as much this time as it had the last, and maybe she had hallucinated it, because this type of pain could only come once, and –

As suddenly as the flashback had begun, she returned to reality. "What did you do?" she asked, breathless.

"If you don't mind, Johanna, I would like you to return to Geonosis as a guide to my former apprentice. Whatever the wishes of Republic Intelligence might be, the Jedi Order will want this matter investigated further."

* * *

 _One-Eyed King, en route to Corellia_

His stomach grumbled. It had been what, thirty, forty hours since he'd last eaten? Longer since he'd slept. Peeta rubbed his temples, doing his best to fend off what had turned into one hell of a headache.

"Peeta?" Even Prim's whisper made his head pound. "What are we going to do after this?"

He had to think about that one for a moment. For the last day and a half, his every thought had been consumed with trying to survive the next ten minutes. Getting out of Twelve, the speeder ride to Eleven, securing transport off world before the Peacekeepers locked down the district… none of it had left time to make a long-term plan. But now, safely aboard the _One-Eyed King_ and en route to Corellia, they had to think further ahead. "Do you have a way to get ahold of your sister?" he asked. The girl paused. "Prim, I need to know. You can trust me. I'm not going to turn her in."

"I know the comm code for Uncle Haymitch's cantina on Coruscant. He'll be able to get ahold of Katniss."

Peeta nodded. "We'll call him once we land on Corellia, have her come get you there."

"How are we going to pay for it? I don't have any money." She was what twelve, maybe thirteen or fourteen at the most? Children, even capable ones like Prim, shouldn't have to worry about such things. The Seam made them grow up hard and far too soon.

He thought about the rapidly-dwindling supply of credits in his pocket. There should be enough in there for a comm call. Not much after that, but he would be all right. A grown man could fend for himself a lot better than a teenage girl could. "Don't worry, I'll pay for it."

"And what will you do?"

"Still figuring that one out." He laid back against the metal floor. "Get some sleep, Prim. I know the floor's not comfortable, but it's as good as we're going to get for a while."

* * *

 _Jedi Temple Hangars, Coruscant_

The weird little old lady who turned out to be a Jedi Master and her tall, sun-bronzed prot égé made an odd pair. Mags leaned heavily on her cane as she spoke to him in hushed tones. Johanna knew they intended for this to be a private moment, but Intelligence had trained her too well for her to not listen in. The hangars beneath the Jedi Temple must have been designed by an eavesdropper. They lacked the constant activity she'd come to associate with docking bays all over the galaxy, and the acoustics

"Be careful, Finnick. Darkness surrounds us."

He nodded, absolutely serious. Gods, they were sickening. "I will be." Finnick Odair looked like he had come straight out of some Jedi holodrama. With the robes, the perfectly disheveled hair, and those brilliant green eyes, he was probably some casting director's wet dream brought to life. If she was dumb enough to judge on looks alone, she would have bet he could help her. Lucky for the universe, she wasn't quite that stupid. Nobody, Jedi or not, could be prepared for their first real mission. She didn't care if he'd been in dangerous situations a million times with some Jedi Master or another. It wasn't the same as being stuck in a tight spot with nobody but yourself to rely on.

"Are we ready?" Johanna butted in. The sooner they finished their little lovefest, the sooner they could get to Geonosis and end this kriffing nightmare.

Mags nodded. "May the Force be with you," she said to Finnick.

"And with you as well, Master." With a pat on the cheek, Mags nudged him towards where Johanna waited. "Ready?" he asked.

She didn't bother to answer that, instead hoisting her bag onto her shoulder and heading up the pedramp. He followed close behind. Johanna knew Finnick planned on piloting the shuttle they'd been provided for the mission, but she plopped herself down in the pilot's seat. He didn't argue the point. "So, this is your first time away from home, huh?"

"I've been on missions before. Don't worry about me." Cocky. Just her luck.

Fine, she could work with this. She'd just have to whip him into shape. "Not worrying about each other is how mission partners end up dead." Johanna busied herself with the pre-flight checklist, but she could still feel his eyes on her. "What?" she snapped.

He gave her a wide grin that had to have melted hearts from here to the Outer Rim. "Trust me. What could go wrong?"


	5. Chapter 5

_Jedi Temple, Coruscant_

"You believe that the Intelligence agent's worries have merit?"

She nodded. "I have seen what she encountered there. The mind is powerful, but no delusions are so detailed. Whatever Republic Intelligence may choose to believe, Agent Mason did stumble across a battle droid factory." Thoughts such as these had no place in the meditation chambers. Hundreds of such rooms littered the Jedi Temple, furnished with soft chairs designed to accommodate thousands of species and gentle lighting. The Temple's designers had envisioned them as chambers of peace and tranquility, not war.

Master Woof, her colleague of over eighty years, watched her carefully. "And when you peered into Agent Mason's memories, did you find any indication of the motivation behind this army's creation? Snow already holds absolute power over his Confederacy. He has little use for so many battle droids within his own territories."

"And we are so certain it is within his own territories that he plans on deploying them?" she asked.

Woof shook his head. "The Masters have not foreseen such an event."

"The Masters also failed to sense that Snow was creating a droid army large enough to subdue an entire star system. We can no longer put any faith in what we do or do not sense. The dark side clouds everything, and it is only moving closer."

"Always in motion, the future is," Woof said, adopting the tone and style of their long-departed former master. Mags smiled at the mimicry, a relic of good times unfortunately long since passed. But in times such as these, moments of lightness had to be fleeting. Woof's voice reclaimed its usual soft, serious edge. "It would be in the best interest of all to proceed with caution. You should not have sent Finnick without first consulting the rest of the Council."

The meditation chambers were not a place for sparring, verbal or otherwise, and she did not take kindly to being scolded as one might a disobedient padawan. "The Council," she replied, "would have wasted time debating the matter for hours."

"Avoiding mistrust within the Council is hardly a waste of time."

"Would it have been a waste of time if, as we have so often of late, we had asked the Supreme Chancellor what she wished for us to do? You know how Chancellor Coin would have reacted. The woman doesn't believe in the power of the Force, would have said I was looking to broaden the powers of the Jedi through making false claims. Even though the droids make a direct threat to Republic security, she would not have wanted to risk angering Snow by sending Jedi in. By the time we managed to get Finnick off-world – _if_ we managed to get Finnick off-world, there's no guarantees on that – he could have an army large enough to topple the Republic!" Mags realized she was ranting, and she stopped herself. She felt a rush of guilt at the thought of arguing in the meditation chambers, but in the face of evil, conflict sometimes had to replace quiet contemplation.

Woof stayed silent for a long moment before nodding. "I understand your frustrations, but what would you propose as a solution? The Council governs the Jedi, ensures that individuals are kept accountable for their actions. Even as Council members ourselves, we cannot disregard its collective authority, for -"

"For without it, we are no better than the Sith, just individuals more powerful than others and with a will to shape the galaxy in our own image," she finished for him. "I know, Wolf. There's no good solution. But there is a very real problem."

"That, I think we can all agree on."

* * *

 _Abernathy's Cantina, Coruscant_

Dried blood crusted under her fingernails, and her hands stung, but Katniss could not stop picking at the skin around her nails. The first two hours, she had braided and unbraided her hair, but it had started falling out, first only one or two strands at a time, then three, four, five. She would have to find something else soon, hopefully before she did any real damage.

These were the thoughts she allowed herself to think. The ones that hovered at the edge of her consciousness were the ones that could really bite. Six hours, and Haymitch hadn't been able to locate Prim. Katniss would owe him a lot after this. Comm calls halfway across the galaxy didn't come cheap, and to reach Panem, which officially allowed no information to flow out or in became very expensive very quickly. She had long since lost count of how many favors he had cashed in tonight. For a barkeeper in a seedy neighborhood, he had friends in very high places. And his network reached deep into the Confederacy's government. Every few minutes, the datapad before her would ping with a new message, and she would grab it before the man could, and each time, she was disappointed. She swore they now had the location of everyone in Panem except Prim.

Gale had paced behind her for the first few hours, to the point where Katniss had wondered if perhaps he had worn a path into the cheap linoleum flooring. She had been annoyed enough to snap at him once or twice about it, early on. She had her habits too, but at least they were quiet. Now, she wished he would start again. Nobody should have to hear that news.

"No Everdeens, huh? How about Mellark? The bakers, you know them?" She heard garbled voices, the other end of Haymitch's conversation. "Peeta, the youngest one, maybe nineteen or twenty. You heard anything about him?" More noise. "That's the older one, Rye, I think. Yeah, yeah, I know. Hard to tell 'em apart. Listen, you hear anything more, you get ahold of me all right? You know how to find me."

"No luck?" she asked, more to check that she could still talk than because she would learn anything new.

Haymitch shook his head. "No luck." He peered around her, towards the back exit, always handy in these types of establishments. "How's Gale doing?"

"Not sure. He left 'bout twenty minutes ago. Didn't say anything about where he was headed."

"And you let him go after what he just heard? The hell are you thinking, Katniss?"

Her face flamed. Still, she refused to admit fault, even to Haymitch. _Especially_ to Haymitch. "Gale is an adult. He can do what he wants."

The man snorted. "And is that what you're going to tell the security forces when they ask you to identify the body tomorrow morning? Kriff, Katniss, it's admirable to care about your sister, but you can't let your friend jump off a pedwalk because you've got your head to far up your –"

"Stop it, okay? Stop it. You could have stopped him too. This isn't just my fault."

"I've been trying to find your sister for the past –"

"Fine. I'll find him," she said.

Haymitch watched her warily. "You have no idea where he went, remember?"

Katniss shrugged. "I'll manage. If anybody knows how to find Gale, it's me." Somehow, she managed to sound a lot more confident about that than she felt.

"You know your way around this level? Got a way I can get ahold of you?"

"I'm not an idiot, Haymitch."

"You sure?" She snorted at his comment and grabbed her jacket from where she'd left it next to the door. "Sure, fine, you've got a decent head on your shoulders, and sometimes, you even use it. But you're also a pretty girl walking around the midlevels at night. It doesn't hurt to check."

"Save your worrying for someone who needs it." Even with her jacket on, the blast of cool air when she opened the door surprised her. It would be summer back home, and though she hadn't been back to Twelve in years, it still felt wrong that it was what passed for winter here. Katniss stepped out, then ducked her head back in. "You'll call me if you hear something, right? You've got my comm code?"

"You'll know the second I do, sweetheart." Kriff if he couldn't make even endearments sound like insults.

* * *

There had not been a reliable survey of Coruscanti population trends in centuries, perhaps millennia. Every few years, some professor at some prestigious university would undertake the project, armed with millions in government grant credits to do what no one else had managed. But when it came to this project, even brilliance, the latest, most advanced methods, and a generous helping of good intentions were not enough. First off, the population was a moving target. Beings moved in and out of Coruscant at a rate that could empty and repopulate average-sized planets in a week. Certain species proved difficult to count. Did Echinae, which wandered about as seven seeming-individuals during their youth but bonded into one hyper-intelligent being only weeks into their year-long lifespan, count as one being or seven? What about hive-minded beings where one queen achieved sentience while her workers were little more than low-functioning organic droids?

But those were drips in a proverbial pond compared to the sheer size of Coruscant. What must once have been merely urban sprawl had crawled over the surface, bricking over lakes, leveling mountains to make way for building upon building. Now, few of the super-skyscrapers that covered the city-planet's surface touched bedrock, instead building their foundations on top of the ruins of older, smaller structures. All the professors ever managed were estimates. Some said nine hundred billion, some went as high as two trillion. Though the second figure seemed high to most experts, no one could prove it wrong. Most books went with the nice, round one trillion figure.

In any case, Coruscant had become a sea of living things, the perfect place to hide and never be found. And Gale, it seemed, planned to make excellent use of it.

Half an hour of looking later, she had managed to comb through perhaps five or six blocks, and that included only the publicly-accessible streets and establishments on this level. He easily could have gone a few up or a few down on one or another of the turbolifts that dotted the sides of the buildings.

She would know if he jumped. Katniss told herself that again and again as she searched. She had known, deep in her gut, when the mine collapsed, burying her father. Even before the search teams had managed to dig out the tunnel, she knew that Lark Everdeen wouldn't be returning to the surface except in a body bag. No, she couldn't think about that, not now. The dead were beyond saving; Gale needed all her attention.

Katniss gave up conscious thought and let her feet take her wherever they willed. Why not? Being deliberate and methodical hadn't gotten her anywhere. She knew this part of the city from years of coming to Abernathy's, so getting lost wasn't going to be a problem. She didn't really note where she was headed as she went through narrow, winding alleyways and crossed busy pedwalks so high that one could see nothing but city and sky when they looked down from them. Alien languages danced around her, animated and lively. Some, she could understand, most she didn't. Once or twice, she'd catch the eye of some shady being, but a glare was always enough to send them scurrying back into the shadows. Though it was counterintuitive, the streets here got safer as the night went on, for the beings really itching for a fight had already made their ways to the lower levels.

And she found herself in an outdoor café, closed at this time of night, but not at all securely guarded. Katniss stepped over the rope that separated it from the boulevard to join the figure hunched at one of the cheery yellow tables.

"Fancy finding you here," she said in her best attempt at lightness.

Something akin to a smile pulled at Gale's cheeks, but he said nothing.

"I'm really sorry about what happened to your family. That's terrible."

"Yeah, me too."

Hugging him felt off, for they had long avoided any kind of physical affection, but she gave it a try anyway. With any other two people, it would have been warm and comforting. The hug only managed to make her feel even more inadequate of a friend. "Want to get back to Haymitch's? He's worried about you."

"You can. I just want to sit for a while."

Silence moments felt longer than loud ones. Maybe it was a fundamental rule of the universe, maybe it was just human perception, but you couldn't do anything to convince Katniss otherwise. But in that time, she kept returning to the same thoughts again and again until she could no longer keep silent. "I'm going to make him pay for this."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yeah. I'm going to make Snow wish he never so much as thought about the Seam."

Gale snorted. "And how are you going to do that? One woman and a beat-up ship against the Confederacy? I don't think I could talk anyone into taking odds on that."

Solid reasoning, at least on the surface, but she had to point out the flaw. "I've got a copilot too, right?"

He smiled, and hell if that wasn't worth just about anything. Now, all she had left to do was figure out how to make a half-baked dream of revenge into a very satisfying reality.


	6. Chapter 6

_Im'g'twe Hills, Geonosis_

"There's something down there, that's for sure."

"You really thought I'd made the whole thing up, dragged your sorry skin halfway across the galaxy for it?" she snapped back.

Finnick shrugged and gave her one of those smiles she had learned to hate over these last few days. "A healthy dose of skepticism has never hurt anyone."

"Says the man who believes in magic."

"The Force isn't magic. It's an all-encompassing energy field created by life itself." These Jedi types sure got defensive when someone suggested their sorcery was something less than a perfect science, didn't they?

Johanna rolled her eyes. "Okay, sure. Whatever you say, pal." With that, she turned her attention back to the controls. The Geonosians had to have some kind of defense system in place, or at the very least some type of air traffic controller that should have gotten ahold of them by now. No world, particularly not a world that had enormous, secret manufacturing complexes, would take security so lightly. She had come in through the usual public channels the first time, and so hadn't encountered much scrutiny, but now? She didn't put a lot of faith in luck in general, but in situations like this, such coincidences and oversights became even more suspicious.

Finnick, though, hadn't seemed to catch on yet. "And it's what's telling me that the hills are teeming with life that, according to the official records, shouldn't be there. But don't you worry. I knew you were telling the truth." He added a wink at the end. Kriff, he could really be too smug for his own good sometimes. And now, after almost a week of sharing a space that included only two cramped sleeping bunks, a tiny 'fresher, and the cockpit, she was starting to think that 'sometimes' might actually be 'all the time.'

No matter, none of that charm was going to get to her. Johanna could promise that much. "And if you want to present your magic knowledge to Intelligence as proof that the Geonosians are making battle droids, I'm not going to stop you. I will tell you, though, that command's made up of way bigger skeptics than me, and they'll laugh you out of the room." And they would, too. If they had refused to believe Mags, who had been a respected member of the Jedi Council for longer than Johanna had been alive, when she'd tried to tell them that Johanna's "hallucinations" were nothing of the sort, they surely wouldn't believe Finnick.

"I think I could win them over." He winked, and that urge to smack him reared its ugly head again. At some point, she would have to give into it. If she could limit her observations about Finnick Odair to one point, it would be that people didn't smack that pretty face of his often enough. She would really be doing him – as well as the rest of the galaxy – a huge favor. "What do you think about setting down there?" He nodded towards an area just north of the hills.

"If they'll let us, I suppose it'll work."

"Well, then, let's say hello and ask them." He flicked on the comm unit. "Would you like to do the honors, or should I?" She shrugged, and he leaned in towards the mouthpiece. "Vessel six-five-eff-oh-seven-five, calling Geonosis control. Come in, control." He waited several seconds, looking over to Johanna worriedly when he heard nothing from the other end. Such a delay was commonplace on busy worlds like Coruscant, but they hadn't seen more than a handful of other vessels enter the system. "Vessel six-five-eff-oh-seven-five, calling Geonosis control. Are you there, control? Do you copy?"

The unit fizzed for a moment, and then, finally, a response came. "This is Geonosis planetary control," a female voice, almost certainly a droid for no sentient would be so cheery about a job in space traffic control, replied. "Requesting identification and the purpose of your visit."

"We'll send you our identification information right away," Finnick answered. "And tourism."

Well, there was her confirmation that the controller was a droid. Nobody would believe that Geonosis, with its enormous colonies of insects that rejected all outsiders and inhospitable climate could attract tourists. It was a pretty world, full of beautiful, towering stone spires and red-gold sand, and she had to give it that. Still, there were plenty of other beautiful things to see in this galaxy, and a lot of them didn't require risking one's neck to see. Personally, she would prefer to _ooh_ and _ahh_ over a few pictures of Geonosis then spend her actual vacation time somewhere with five-star resorts and no bugs.

"Verification received. What city would you like to dock in?"

"We'd prefer to be out in the hills, if that's possible. We've heard there's some great hiking out there."

She held her breath at the pause that followed. This could be it. The controller could call them on their bluff, send in the fighters or orbital weapons that they had to have, and there would be pieces of them floating around the system for millennia. "Permission granted. Have a pleasant visit."

"Thank you very much, and have a great day." Finnick grinned at her as he plotted a course for the hills.

* * *

The instant he stepped out onto the planet's surface, Finnick was hit with a blast of hot air joined with grains of sand that scraped at his skin. Nice place. From Johanna's descriptions, it was only going to get better. "How are you doing?"

"Just great." She might as well just growl if she was going to take that attitude.

He really shouldn't, but what was fun than poking at an animal that might just bite in return? "So, are you having a good time?"

"You know, Odair? I'm kind of getting a weird feeling about this place."

"Wait, really? What?"

"Well," she put on a perfectly innocent face, which really should have been his first clue something was off, "It's almost like I've been here before."

He snorted. "Any other feelings I should know about?"

"You put too much emphasis on your feelings. Sometimes they aren't intuition, they're just feelings. Everyone's got 'em, and most people know not to put too much thought into them. You Jedi should try it sometime."

"We do have feelings," he protested. "We just don't allow them to govern our actions like most beings do."

"Trust me, if I was governed by my feelings, I would be getting the hell out of here right now."

Johanna obviously wasn't listening, so he let the matter drop. He could always bring it up again later if she seemed more responsive. "How much further until we get to the clearing?" he asked, starting their conversation on a different path. It didn't really matter at this point, since they had to be at least a couple hours away still, but talking would make the time pass more quickly.

She checked her datapad. "Eight and a half kilometers. We've got quite the hike ahead of us."

"Sounds like fun." He adjusted the pack on his back, filled with enough supplies to last the average human male five days. With his Jedi training and careful rationing, Finnick estimated he could stretch it to at least two weeks, maybe three if he kept still.

"Keep up that attitude, Odair, and I'm sure it will be. Just keep your mouth shut and all those lovely thoughts to yourself, and I bet it'll be even better."

They walked in silence for over an hour after that. Every minute or two, he would calm his mind and allow the Force to guide him towards the factory like a homing beacon. Thousands of lives buzzed with constant energy only a hive dedicated to a cause could conjure. They were close now, closer than Johanna's map said they should be. He had little doubt the coordinates she had recorded during her last visit were correct, for she was efficient, if often a little less than friendly. But she had seen only one of many entrances, and if his feeling of where the plant began was anywhere close to accurate, this operation was far larger than Johanna had realized. Stretching his consciousness further, he estimated that it might be as long as four or five kilometers and almost as wide. What Johanna had described to him was big, but it couldn't begin to compare to the entire plant. Hundreds of new droids created every hour, enough to topple entire star systems ready within a month. It had been weeks since Johanna was last here. How many more droids had been built because Intelligence refused to believe one of their own agents? When it came time for those droids to be used – and they would be used, he had no doubt of that – how many more beings would die because they were too stubborn to just listen and act?

So caught up was Finnick in his thoughts that it took him a moment to realize that something had changed. He felt a flash of danger in the Force, and more out of instinct than conscious thought, he grabbed Johanna around the waist, pulling her flush against the cliffisde. "The kriff are you-" she began, but he clapped a hand over her mouth.

"Something's coming," he whispered, scanning the area for any hint as to what had triggered the sensation. Nothing stirred, and for an instant, he wondered if it was just nerves, if the creepiness of the hills had gotten to him. Then came a deep rumbling from beneath them. Red-gray dust rained down on them, and not twenty meters away, a hole in the ground appeared, dilating open like the pupil of some enormous eye.

Fascinating, but he didn't intend on sticking around to watch it. "Run!" he shouted, and Finnick bolted down the canyon, lightsaber in hand. Johanna was in the excellent shape required of an Intelligence field agent, but she couldn't keep up with his Force-augmented speed for long. When she began to slow, he grabbed her wrist and pulled her along, catching a glimpse of the hole behind them as he did. It was as large as their ship now, and he could just spot the tops of a few battle droids emerging from it. "Brace yourself," he warned Johanna only heartbeats before he pushed her into a crevice in the wall. His green lightsaber flared to life, and he batted back two bolts before he even heard them fire. Now that he could get a good look at them, Finnick could get an idea of the severity of the threat. Two dozen droids, and none of them had the yellow markings of the officer class. They must not have been expecting a Jedi. Good.

"Stay here." He wrapped the Force around him like a cloak, feeling that power, warm and seductive, crackle inside him. It took one leap, during which he deflected a handful more shots, to take him behind the droids. He had six on the ground in sizzling pieces before the rest managed to turn around. Finnick sent a few a few more blasts back their way, and they were down a third of their original force. He allowed himself a grin. This was going to be easy.

Johanna had moved out of the crevice and had started to contribute to the blaster fire. With all the noise around him, Finnick didn't even notice until a droid dropped before him for no obvious reason. When he saw the smoking hole in its back, centimeters away from where the heart would be on a human, he chucked Johanna a sloppy salute. Nineteen down, five to go. With any luck, they'd have enough time to get out of here before reinforcements arrived. Intelligence would just have to take his word for it that the factory existed. These droids were falling like dominos, but the two of them wouldn't be nearly as effective against a much larger force.

One more twist of his hand, and the last one crumpled into a twisted ball of durasteel. Finnick kept his lightsaber on for a moment more, half-expecting another droid to come out from the shadows, but only the music of the wind in the canyons greeted him. "Johanna?" he asked as she reached back into the crevice.

"One moment." She pulled out her holorecorder and shot him a wolflike grin. "I think this is all the evidence we'll need." She tucked the device into her belt and started sprinting down the canyon, back towards their ship. "Come on, Odair, what are you waiting for?" her voice echoed back towards him.

He shook his head, taking a moment to wipe the sweat from his forehead before starting after her.

* * *

Three more squads attacked them on the hour it took them to run back to the ship. A shot managed to graze Finnick's thigh, but otherwise, they were unscathed. He stood guard as Johanna entered the key code with fumbling hands, and after a few false starts, he raced up the ramp only steps behind her.

He slammed into the pilot's seat and immediately started the launch sequences. "We've got company!" Johanna shouted, too loud for the confined space of the cockpit, and he glanced up to see another squad of twenty-four battle droids emerging from the hillside.

"Get the shields up. I should be able to have us out of here before they get in range."

"On it." Half a second later, a blast rocked the ship, and a dozen sirens started going off. "It's the hyperdrive and the shields. Get us out of here. I'll see what I can do."

He wanted to argue with her, there was fire on the wings for kriff's sake, but she was already gone. Three seconds left in engine warmup, two seconds, _one._ "Hold on!" he shouted back as he lifted off. The controls shook underneath him, but most of them still seemed to be working, at least. He'd take getting off to a wobbly start over being stuck on the surface with thousands of battle droids any day.

Finnick heard a muffled _oof_ from the back as he took them through the bumpy upper layer of the atmosphere. "Johanna, you need to get your crash webbing on. We're going through the asteroid field for the extra cover."

"Just when I thought this day couldn't get any better." Still, she sat down next to him and engaged her webbing. "I can't do anything for the shields or the hyperdrive until we land. Even then, the hyperdrive's probably going to need a professional."

He nodded, focusing on the asteroid belt before them. "So what you're saying is that we'll be lucky to get through this in one piece."

"We were going to have to be lucky to get through an asteroid field even with shields."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence." He jinked and twisted the ship through the outer layer, managing to avoid the bigger rocks. The little ones, smaller than his hand and some only millimeters wide, did their own damage. It wasn't what he would have chosen to do under ideal circumstances, but he couldn't risk going into the denser part of the field, and even the smaller particles should give them enough cover to dissuade pursuit. As it was, the ship couldn't take more than the bare minimum of abuse. The ship buckled beneath them with every collision, and even dust-sized particles getting into the damaged hyperdrive unit ensured they wouldn't be getting out of the system anytime soon. Johanna stayed uncharacteristically silent through the entire affair, and he braved a quick look to find her white-knuckled, holding onto the arms of her seat for dear life, her face a stomach-churning shade of green. "Don't worry. We're almost out."

Perhaps it was the Force punishing him for his moment of inattention, or fate for tempting it, but at the _crack_ that reverberated through the ship a half-second later, Finnick knew some higher power was against him. Dimly, he could hear Johanna retching, but he focused on the diagnostic screens. It had been the landing gear and stabilizers. Fantastic.

As well as he could with the navicomputer half-dead, Finnick plotted a course for the outermost world in the system. He couldn't swear by it, but he seemed to remember that the world, whose name eluded him, had both a small population and enough oxygen that he and Johanna should be able to breathe without masks. They should also manage to get there in only a few minutes. For now, that would have to be enough.

"How are you holding up?" he asked once he was confident they had escaped both the asteroid field and the danger it presented.

"I'm trying to."

"That's all I ask." Finnick reached over and patted her on the shoulder.

"And if you don't keep your hands to yourself, Odair, there'll be pieces of you spread all over the system."

He chuckled at that. Good to see Johanna was feeling better. Now, if he could find a way to keep her that way, he'd be a very happy man indeed. Too bad they were in for what was shaping up to be a crash landing any minute here. "You still got the holorecorder?"

She nodded.

"Keep ahold of it. This is going to be a little rough." He prayed that he wasn't lying, there would only be a little roughness. A bit of turbulence, a few bumps, and they'd be fine. Get much more than that, and Finnick couldn't make any promises. He took a deep breath as the plant expanded before them, growing to take up more and more of the viewport until all he could see was a solid plane of green, which he hoped corresponded to a grassy field on this planet, or perhaps an enormous algae bloom. Something soft and spongy was probably too much to hope for, but he couldn't bring himself to care right now.

The atmosphere was always a little bumpy, that was to be expected, but they should be going slower. He tried to slow them, but the controls were useless, and the Force could only do so much. Johanna screamed, and an instant after he realized that the texture before them had to be grass, pain raced up his spine, his vision exploding into thousands of blindingly bright lights as his entire body screamed in agony for a long moment before everything disappeared.


	7. Chapter 7

**Act Two: The Destroyed Starship**

* * *

 _Jedi Temple, Coruscant_

The deeper she pried into the future, the more it eluded her. Mags examined her frustration, that ball of negative energy inside of her, looking at it from this angle and that in order to truly understand both what it was and where it had come from. Then, with an exhale, she let go of it. Frustration and anger lined the path to the dark side, and a Jedi's mind was better off without them.

The same events played out again and again before her. A million droids raining down in swarms on vulnerable star systems she couldn't quite identify. The Senate, locked into uselessness by its own corruption, debating the same issues endlessly while billions suffered. And behind all of it, a shadowy figure lurked, making them all dancelike marionettes with a single pull of their puppet strings. There, the visions ended, just before Mags pulled off the cloak to reveal the face beneath.

Always in motion, the future was. How many times had her own master repeated that adage to her? Her lips quirked up in a smile. Perhaps this made a better question: when would she finally learn to listen to him? She would learn nothing more today. After one last inspection, Mags let the future slip away, just as she had with her frustration. For now, the Force could keep its secrets.

She had almost risen when a sudden, blinding vision overtook her. She was burning, the entire front of her body awash in pain. _Finnick._ Mags screamed, but as quickly as the vision came, it was gone. Mags reached out in the Force, trying to reach her former apprentice. His presence was faint, but it was still there. Alive but unconscious, perhaps.

 _Hold on, Finnick. Hold on._

* * *

 _Agora, Sluis Sector_

"Gale, are you ready?"

"Ready as I'm going to be," he answered from the belly turret, the comm unit barely fuzzing the resolve in his voice.

"Good." She took a long, deep breath to settle her nerves. Okay, she could do this. "We're going to be heading in in three, two, one, _now_." With a single pull of a lever, the _Mockingjay_ was yanked back into realspace. Her stomach dropped out from underneath her when she saw the dozen single-pilot TIE fighters that accompanied their target, the merchant fleet. "Kriff."

"Katniss, my sensors are going nuts. What have we gotten ourselves into?"

They should really replace those sensors in the gun turrets. If they couldn't track ten TIES… oh no. More ships began to pop up on the sensors. One, two, three – Katniss stopped counting at ten. Beyond that, there wasn't much of a point to putting numbers to it. Whoever was directing these guys had a brain, for the ships fanned out around the _Mockingjay_ , blocking her from making the jump to light speed and escaping. None besides the TIEs seemed to be heavily armed, but given the sheer number of them, she wasn't feeling too relieved. The goal had been to hit the air locks on the freighters with everything they had and run like crazy. Perhaps someone had gotten wind of the plans they had laid out with Haymitch's help, or maybe they had stepped up security due to an independent event. Either way, the original idea wasn't going to work. "New plan," she announced.

"Which is?" Even with the fuzzy sound the cheap comm added, he sounded wary.

She flipped switches and pulled levers as quickly as her hands could manage. "We take as many fighters as we can out with us." The _Mockingjay_ launched into action, shooting at a significant proportion of light speed toward the very center of the fleet. Immediately, a handful of TIEs were upon them, green lasers striking all around the _Mockingjay_. The entire ship bounced whenever a shot threatened to overwhelm the shields, and all nine Corellian hells, judging by the way the _Mockingjay_ was practically vibrating now, these guys could shoot. She couldn't divert any more power to the shields, as they were already running at capacity. All there was to do now was keep going and pray that atoms of them didn't end up sprayed all over the sector.

Luckily, Gale could more than hold his own against the enemy fighters. Though he had only a single quad laser canon at his disposal, she spotted nearly as many red blasts as green, and there were significantly fewer blips on her sensors now than there had been just a minute or two prior. That let her focus on finding a way out of this mess. They had already made a pass almost all the way through the formation, but to escape, they would have to slip in between two of the freighters. That might not be a problem, but depending on how well-armed the freighters were, it could be the last mistake she ever made.

Katniss wasn't going to take that gamble. "We're going in for another pass. See if you can't hit one or two of the freighters." If he managed that, they might just be able to slip through the gap left behind and escape in one piece. No guarantees, but when in recent memory had there ever been a guarantee on anything?

"Will do." His voice was shaky with adrenaline. Katniss would bet money hers sounded similar. They needed to get out of here before one or the other of them made a mistake.

"Okay, hold on." Katniss flipped some controls, and then felt herself being lifted from her seat as the artificial gravity tried to compensate for the flip. The entire ship groaned at the maneuver. "Come on, baby, hold together. We'll get through this all right," she murmured.

"What was that?"

"Nothing," Katniss answered. "You breathe a word of that to anyone, and you're a dead man, Hawthorne."

Two fireballs exploded before her, all that remained of two TIE fighters that couldn't outshoot Gale, and at the same moment, the _Mockingjay_ 's engine let out a reassuring hum. Katniss had to grin. Maybe they really could get out of this mess. She scanned the area for targets, her eyes settling on a bulky freighter perhaps ten times the size of the _Mockingjay_. She couldn't be certain what attracted her to it, but it had a huge airlock on the side facing the _Mockingjay_ , and at least from this vantage point, she couldn't spot any weapons on it. "See the one with the red stripe?" she asked.

"Red stripe, red stripe… good idea. Locking on it."

"I'll set you up." She held onto the controls so tightly that her knuckles went white as she performed the maneuver. Flipping over, reversing direction, and then flying towards a solid object with no forgiveness if she overshot it was challenging under the best circumstances. Surrounded by a few dozen other ships, most of which were currently firing at you, was not what Katniss would describe as the best circumstances. No time to think about that now. There was that second of lightheadedness at the flip, then she saw nothing but fire. Katniss stiffened, sure this was the end, that they had failed at their revenge and hadn't even managed to take out a single freighter with them, but then the flames cleared, and she was staring at open space. Gale's whoop cut through the haze that had engulfed her in that moment of terror, and she grinned from ear to ear.

"Great shot!" she congratulated him as she maneuvered through that gap.

"Y'know, you didn't do so bad yourself, Catnip." She shook her head at that, but chose not to respond, instead directing her attention towards calculating their jump. The second that the navicomputer finished, she made the jump to light speed. As she collapsed back in the pilot's seat, Katniss wondered if it the cramped cabin had ever felt so comfortable.

* * *

 _District Four, Panem Sector_

A warm, gentle presence surrounded him. _Do not be afraid,_ it seemed to whisper, and he wasn't. Finnick opened his eyes, and though the world was blurred, as if still floating through a dream, he could make out shapes above him. Drying herbs and spices, perhaps.

"I'm glad to see you're awake. I was starting to worry about you." Every muscle hurt, but he craned his neck to the side to see the source of the voice. Though the woman was petite, she stooped somewhat in order to not hit her head on the low ceiling. Her dark hair spilled down to her waist in wild curls, and enormous green eyes studied him intently. "How do you feel?" she asked.

"Not my best." He started to stand, but she moved over towards the bunk and pushed him back down.

"No, I just managed to stop the bleeding. I'll not have you open the wound again."

"Which one?"

With one finger, she traced the bandage that adorned his otherwise bare chest. "There were others as well, but they healed more quickly."

"Thank you."

"You are very welcome, Finnick Odair." Now that he got to looking at her, she couldn't be much older than him. No more than twenty-five, certainly, and he would guess more along the lines of twenty-two, twenty-three. Pretty, too, though he pushed away that thought as soon as it came to him. Some backwater healer's attractiveness had no bearing on his current mission, and he'd do well to remember it.

"My reputation precedes me?" He quirked an eyebrow.

She laughed and shook her head. "No, I found your indentichip as I was emptying your pockets. By the way, I have all of your things over there." She gestured towards a basket so loosely woven and rough that it had to have been handmade. "I'm Annie Cresta. Pleased to finally meet you."

"You too." Pain sliced through his chest as he reached up in an offer to shake hands.

"Stop it. I spent too long stitching you up to have to do it again."

"Did you take me from the crash?"

The woman nodded. "Yes, I saw the explosion when your ship crashed. It was not far from here – when you are well again, the two of us can walk to the site, if you would like. You and your friend, the woman, you were both badly injured, but you more than her. I brought you back here first, but when I returned, she was gone."

He straightened, earning himself another reprimand. "You have no idea what happened to her?"

Those big green eyes had gone horribly serious. "No. I've asked the others who live around here, and none of them have seen a strange woman about." Finnick reached out in the Force, but he felt no hint of Johanna. Annie's words broke his concentration. "Is she your wife?"

"No, we're just friends." He thought for a long moment. "You're sure nobody around here knows what could have happened to her? There aren't any settlements or anything around where she could have ended up, are there?" His first mission, and he had managed not only to crash his ship into some wasteland, but also lose the very person he was trying to keep safe. Great kriffing Jedi Knight he was turning out to be. And now, when Johanna could be in any kind of danger, he was worrying about how the mistake would reflect on him. So much for giving up pride.

"Don't be upset, Finnick. I am sure you will find your friend. When you are well again, I will take you to the site. Perhaps you will see clues there that I did not. You may talk to the people in the town as well. They may have more answers for you than me, or perhaps they will have seen something new."

"Thank you. Thank you very much for everything you've done."

She smiled down at him. "You are very welcome. I would not worry overmuch about your friend. I have seen that she will be quite all right."

"How?"

Annie patted his shoulder, and where she touched, the pain evaporated. "I cannot explain it. Just know that this foresight has never lied to me before."

"And has this foresight revealed anything else to you?"

"That is for me to know and you to find out."

* * *

 _Coronet City, Corellia_

He wiped the grease off his forearm with an already-filthy rag. It would be a minute or two before the boss came around to inspect his afternoon's work. Peeta used the opportunity to guzzle down what little water remained in his canteen. Corellia was a temperate world, but temperatures in the docks, where the work never ended, could climb well over thirty degrees even on the coolest days. The government required that employers provide cooling units for their employees, but then again, the government also required employees to provide identification before starting work. Nobody around here seemed too concerned with either rule.

Peeta would make do. He nodded as the overseer, a Selonian who went by Trace with his humanoid workers, came over to inspect his wiring. At two meters tall, Trace towered over him, and with his sharp claws and needle-like teeth, the fur-covered Selonian could take him down in an instant. Luckily for Peeta, he had so far shown no intent to do so. Peeta intended to keep it that way. The Selonian kneeled down to look at the engine, messing around in the core of the starship for a moment before making a hissing sound of approval. "This good is work," Trace said as he stood up, his pleasure clear despite his somewhat mangled Basic. "You are sure you do not wish to stay and the work continue?"

"I'll stay for as long as I can," Peeta replied. It was true. Hot conditions notwithstanding, he enjoyed working here. Trace was kind enough, far better than the other overseers, who worked their crews from well before the sun rose until hours after nightfall and berated them for the smallest of mistakes. Peeta hadn't known the first thing about starship engines a few weeks ago, but now he could reconstruct one almost from scratch. He shook his head at the metaphor. Whatever he took up, he would always be a baker at heart.

"Sorry to hear that." Trace snatched the rag away from Peeta and started to wipe the grease away from his dark fur. "I am be happy keep you." He couldn't possibly have gotten clean in that amount of time, for Peeta had learned the hard way that the sticky black oil glommed onto hair like glue, but he tossed the rag aside all the same. "There is a message for you in back. Listen then clean, yes?"

He nodded. "Yeah, thanks for letting me know." Peeta managed to keep his steps even, trying not to look too excited about the message waiting for him. Those last few steps, where piles of crates blocked him from view, he allowed himself to run. If this message was what he thought it was – and Peeta couldn't think why anybody else would be comming him – he didn't want it to wait a second longer than he had to.

Peeta checked that the door was shut behind him before he opened the blinking message. A miniaturized blue face crackled from the receiver. Though Peeta had heard much of the man, he had never personally met Haymitch Abernathy. Still, he was familiar enough with the Seam features – black hair, light eyes, olive skin – to spot a Seam man anywhere. "Peeta, I was able to get ahold of Katniss. We've got three thousand waiting for you in account- you're going to want to write this down – account number twenty-three seventy-nine one-oh-two forty-eight at the Five Sisters Bank in Coronet City. Your name is on the account. I now a few people there, and trust me, they won't ask any questions." Haymitch lowered his voice. "Peeta, you need to be careful. There are people after you – big names, people you really don't want to be kriffing with. Get the credits, get the hell out of there, and stay alive, kid."

With that, the transmission fizzled out. Three thousand credits. That should be more than enough to get them smuggled into Coruscant. In as busy of a port as this one, finding transport shouldn't be an issue. There had to be fifty ships leaving Corellia for Coruscant on any given day. Yeah, he could do this. Peeta deleted it from the device's memory and grabbed the few personal possessions he had stowed in one of the lockers during his shift. He didn't stop to speak to Trace, just giving his former crew a wave as he hurried outside.

Get the credits, get Prim, get out of here – seemed like a plan. Oh, and stay alive too. That was an important step.


End file.
